Fact Checker Gets It Wrong on Romney Taxes – But Illustrates the Problem with Today’s Fact Checkers

The Great Media Conspiracy to Revive Mr. Romney's Campaign is Right on Schedule

As indicated earlier, the main stream reporting on the debates centered around reviving the candidacy of Mitt Romney so the press would have a story to write about.  Of course, Mr. Obama seems to have helped with this as he apparently thought the debates would be about facts and substance, and not about unsupported policy.

Case in point, the fact that Mr. Romney’s tax plans do not add up.  Mr. Romney’s positions is that taxes will not be raised or cut for high income tax payers (forgetting of course about the elimination of the Estate Tax which will save high net worth tax payers tens of billions every year).  And Mr. Romney also says that taxes will be cut for middle income tax payers.  And finally, Mr. Romney says that all of this will not increase the deficit.

So do the press and fact check organizations expose this complete contradiction?  No they say that to question this is not just inappropriate, but a lie. Here is the exact quote from Fact Check.

Obama accused Romney of proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. Not true. Romney proposes to offset his rate cuts and promises he won’t add to the deficit.

Wow, Mr. Romney promises that he won’t add to the deficit, so that must be true.  Of course what Mr. Romney is promising goes against basic math, 0 – X where 0 is the change in taxes on high income earners and X is the change on low income earners does not equal zero.  It cannot. 

But to say that is not true is a lie according to Fact Check because Mr. Romney has promised that 0 minus X equals zero. 

Why can’t we have honest fact checkers, or someone who is honest enough to fact check the fact checkers?  We imagine that answer to that is because if Mr. Romney were held to the standard of truth and accuracy there would be no contest.